Kathy Anderson, The Times-PicayuneAngela Leger, standing in front of her Metairie property, was fined $1,186 for lawn maintenance by the Jefferson Parish Code Enforcement and Inspection Department. Leger said that she has maintained the property.

Jefferson Parish's push to turn its neighborhoods into pristine examples of American Suburbia has not left all residents proud to live here.

Angela Leger, for one, is frustrated. A home she rebuilt after Hurricane Katrina in the 2100 block of Maryland Avenue has become a bramble in her relationship with the parish government. She said she has kept the lawn well manicured for years, with the hope to sell it. Parish code enforcers, however, said she neglected to keep overgrown weeds in check.

Those code officers have nailed her with a $1,186 fine this year after parish crews removed "grass, obnoxious weeds, or other deleterious or unhealthful growths" from her property. Work done without her permission, she said.

"No, I'm not happy about it," Leger said Friday when she learned of the fine. "I'm definitely aggravated about this."

Hurricane Katrina had devastated her property four years ago. She rebuilt, cleaned it up. She tried to sell it. Then the code inspectors came and her troubles started.

This is not the first time she has been fined, she said. But she didn't know she was being charged all these years until her mortgage company contacted her. They had been paying her tax bills, bills that now seemed exorbitantly high.

A complete list of the property owners being fined can be found here, here
and here.

The parish, it turned out, had been adding the unpaid fines to owners' taxes.

Collecting the parish's due is a process that takes place every summer. Warnings are tacked on properties, and if nothing is done, the government does the clean-up work.The Code Enforcement and Inspection Department tallies the derelict properties that parish crews keep from going feral and charges the owners for the work.

This year, parish crews fined 132 properties for being derelict; tore down 62 structures and mowed the lawns or clipped weeds at 1,120 other sites. That maintenance will net the parish more than $2.1 million in fines.

But added to the frustration to many property owners, the parish list of alleged laggards includes an odd anomaly. Public records and telephone calls revealed at least two dozen of the property owners named in the list of fines are no longer living.

Villio said the parish attorneys who put together the list had found the living owners - children, inheritors and so on - for each property.

The Parish Council approved the list July 22 at its annual meeting in Grand Isle. Villio said the decision to vote hours away from most of the alleged perpetrators was not a means to avoid their objections, but to meet the assessor's deadline.

Assessor Lawrence Chehardy set Sept. 15 as the deadline to add the final tallies to this year's tax rolls, Villio said. There is only one council meeting in August, leaving last week's convening to be the only convenient time to approve the fines.

Meanwhile, Leger's exasperation remains. She works for a contractor, she said, and so she understands the importance of fighting blight - something of which she said she approves. Still, she said she believes code enforcers caught her in a Catch-22 by fining her.

"It's my word against their word," she said.

.......Richard Rainey can be reached at rrainey@timespicayune.com or 504.883.7052.